Regulatory requirements and business considerations may often require that data be exchanged in a secure manner, particularly in healthcare. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) regulations require secure exchange of data without revealing patient-specific information. Consequently, certain types of data must be modified to obfuscate sensitive or confidential information before being exchanged.
Methods that address de-identification generally address the problems of (1) what should be de-identified, (2) how much should be de-identified, and (3) how it should be de-identified. Various methods of de-identification of documents and metadata fields include built-in code to remove portions marked for de-identification or template-based approaches to redact information from documents in a class of documents. Methods of de-identification have been used for text documents, structured metadata fields such as in Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) metadata, but de-identification of visual media data when the identification is embedded inside the content can be difficult and time consuming.